Book Review: Puppet 3 Beginner's Guide, by John ArundelPreviously, when I had looked to decide whether it was worth learning about Chef or Puppet (or something else altogether), the result was inconclusive, but now I am working somewhere Puppet is used, it's clear. I was looking for a quick-start guide to Puppet, one that would fill in the basic principles without necessarily going into too much depth. This book fulfils that requirement well, explaining the essentials of how Puppet is configured and how it operates on system resources such as users, files and services. The book follows several worked examples, explaining what's going on and why actions are followed. It was straightforward to find parallels with seeing Puppet being used "in anger" at work, which was very helpful in confirming my best guesses of somethings and explaining others. The book certainly is only a beginner's guide - it's clear there is scope to learn much more about it, but for the time being I think I have acquired sufficient general knowledge to meet my needs.